Why I Support Dr Ron Paul for President

What follows is a transcript of a speech that I gave on 12/07/07 at a caucus held under the auspices of the National Presidential Caucus. It was designated as a Republican Caucus for Johnson County, KS


Dr Paul is the only Republican candidate who is unequivocally against the Iraq War and who pledges to bring the troops home with all deliberate and safe speed. He understands that the war in Iraq was pointless, illegal, unconstitutional and a moral horror.

The vast majority of the US public agrees with this. What chance does any other Republican candidate have to beat the Democrats while arguing for continued war?

The war has brought us only bad. We have lost roughly 4000 US soldiers, killed Iraqis totaling close to a million and displaced more than 2 million. This has won us no hearts and minds. Rather it has made us new enemies. Every dead Iraqi has an extended family who wants revenge.

How do the other Republican candidates, who wear their pro-life credentials proudly when it comes to abortion, have no problem with killing innocent Iraqis?

We have increased our national debt by almost $1 trillion to achieve these dubious results. This huge increase in the debt, coupled with runaway spending at home, has placed our economic future in grave peril. The dollar is collapsing before our very eyes. The Federal Reserve is out of options. Their trick of creating new money out of thin air doesn’t fool the suckers any longer.

Dr Paul understands that money only works as a store of value if it is commodity based. Fiat money, like we have now, has a 100% historic failure rate. It always, eventually, inflates away to nothingness.

Conservative Republican candidates always tell us they want a small government and strict constructionist judges. This is their talk, but that is not their walk. Violations of the constitution are an every day event.
Where in the constitution does is say that:
• The president can lock people up without charge or trial
• Wiretaps can occur without search warrants
• People can be kidnapped from one country (without extradition) and sent to another for torture
• The Federal government can have anything to say about anything not on the short list of functions in Article 1, Section 8 of the constitution

Our freedom is melting away as we look. We are significantly less free than 6 years ago. We can not stand idly by. We owe it to our children to give them as much freedom as we inherited from our parents. The only candidate who will help us get that freedom back is Dr Ron Paul.

What Are They Smoking?

I sometimes wonder what the Republican mainstream is thinking. Are they thinking at all? Are they all under the influence of some dastardly drug? Maybe the Democrats drugged them to induce this idiotic self destructive behavior.

How can they expect to win an election with a pro-war candidate? Yet they have put up 9 pro-war candidates and apparently are holding 2 more pro-war candidates in the wings. They ridicule their one and only anti-war candidate.

The Republican candidate will be up against an anti-war Democrat (of variable degree of believability) in November of 2008. Do they really think the public will vote for more war by then? The war is an increasing disaster. It will be unbearable by 2008.

The results will be a Democratic victory and we will then suffer all the other baggage that comes from economically illiterate Democrats. We will have socialized medicine and more welfare state generally. It will be a disaster.

Making sure that Ron Paul is the nominee is an absolute necessity. Any pro-war candidate is idiocy of the first degree.

As a Libertarian, I should probably shut up and watch the Republicans commit party suicide, but I cannot remain silent when the risk to the nation is so great.

Who Is Ron Paul?

Today's title is an unabashed reference to Atlas Shrugged. Who is John Galt? That question permeated the book. Of course, if you persevered, you eventually met the hero of the book and the savior of civilization from the dark cloud of collectivism.

I don't know if Ron Paul can save us from the death of civilization that big government collectivism is leading us to. It may be too late. Nevertheless, we had better give him a chance.

In the past, the two party duopoly got people to vote for the lesser evil over and over again by keeping the existence of a libertarian alternative a secret. If anyone asked, he was told that he would be wasting his vote on the Libertarian and he should pick the lesser evil of the duopoly.

Election after election, the lesser evil won and the evil consequences have cumulatively put us into a precarious situation. Total government debt, including all the welfare entitlements, now exceeds the net worth of the entire nation (that of the government and of the people).

What is different this time is the libertarian alternative is running with a major party label. Of course, the main line Republicans can't stand this and will do their best to kill the only chance the nation has to break free from the evil of the two party lesser evil choice. For the most part, they are using the 'ignore him' approach. I suppose we will see how well that works for them.

The polls are giving mixed results. The polls taken immediately after a debate from debate viewers give Paul the lead. Polls taken of the nation as a whole do not. It appears that name recognition is the difference.

Ron Paul

Today I joined a group of people at the Plaza in Kansas City who were supporters of Ron Paul. These are not paid campaign workers. They are just citizens who know that something is very wrong in our nation. The government ignores the limits on its power put in place by the constitution and that is just not acceptable.

Because the government ignores its limits, we have confiscatory taxation to pay for things that the government should never be paying for. We have bureaucrats telling us what to do and what not to do in every aspect of our lives. We have a rapidly disappearing dollar and a huge debt. We have citizens and non-citizens alike locked up without charge or trial and our government is torturing people in our name.

These people, of many ethnic and party affiliations, all understand what is wrong-too much government. They want desperately to do something to support the one major party candidate that openly favors smaller government and means it. His lifetime voting record proves that he means it.

He is the only Republican candidate who is against the illegal and immoral war in Iraq. Since the vast majority of the public is also anti-war, one wonders what the other nine candidates are thinking. How do they think that they can win a general election?

Is it their expectation to be running against a pro-war Democrat and then give us the usual "lesser evil" story. Well no more lesser evil for this voter. The lesser evil that was elected in 2000 and re-elected in 2004 has killed hundreds of thousands of human beings for no reason. How is that a lesser and acceptable evil?

If neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have an acceptable, peace loving and freedom loving candidate, then I urge all voters to elect the Libertarian candidate. We cannot survive a lesser evil again. You are not wasting your vote. You would waste it voting for the lesser evil one more time.

Ron Paul and the nine war mongers

I had a lot of fun last night watching the Republican presidential debate on Faux News. Nine candidates who think the war in Iraq should go on and torture is OK if you call it enhanced interrogation techniques vs. one lone sane man named Ron Paul.

The moderators surely did their best to marginalize him and try to make him a laughing stock. He held his ground and kept on message. What we are doing in Iraq is very wrong and it must end, ASAP.

After the debate was over, the commentators went out of their way to tell us he was nuts and should not be allowed in future debates. Then came the high point of the evening. They announced that Ron Paul was leading in their text message poll with 30% of the vote. Romney was a close second and Guliani a distant third. The others were in the mud.

Hannitty was only speechless for a moment and then everyone accused Paul of having his people stuff the ballot box. It could not possibly be right.

Later in the evening, more votes pushed Romney ahead and left Paul in second place with Guliani still a distant third. The rest, including McCain and our favorite son, Brownback, remained in the mud. I would like to formally accuse Romney's people of stuffing the ballot box at the end to achieve that first place finish. I have as much evidence as Hannity does.

Can someone tell me how the Republicans expect to win a general election with candidates who openly profess that they want to continue the slaughter in Iraq, torture folks and institute a police state including 'tamperproof identity cards", no habeus corpus and enemy combatants.

Why Do People vote for Either of the Two Big Government Parties

I know I have written on this before, but the quote following brought it back to mind. It also offered a possible explanation.

WHY WE LOVE GOVERNMENT: "We love government because it enables us to accomplish things that if done privately would lead to arrest and imprisonment. For example, if I saw a person in need, and I took your money to help him, I'd be arrested and convicted of theft. If I get Congress to do the same thing, I am seen as compassionate. "This vision ought to bother the Christians among us, for when God gave Moses the commandment "Thou shalt not steal," I'm sure He didn't mean thou shalt not steal unless you got a majority vote in Congress."
-- syndicated columnist Walter Williams.

What should clearly be understood as theft becomes an honorable example of charity when you fall for the big government paradigm. After growing up in this nation, with its government run schooling and its media that dares not criticize the government, it is easy to fall into that trap. Now that you have read this, you are under a moral obligation to rethink the issue.

You give honorable charity when you give your own property. You are a thief when you advocate or cooperate in the giving of someone else's property, assuming the owner has not consented. There is no honor to be had in that situation.

The dishonor is not just upon the congressional representatives that vote for the "charity at gunpoint". It extends to citizens who pressure for it, to the government clerks who collect the taxes and pay out the goodies and even to the newspaper editors who assist in the propaganda that got it passed.

Conservative-What does it mean?

When I first became politically aware as a teenager, Barry Goldwater was running for president. He called his philosophy conservative. He believed in small and obedient government, obedient to the constitution. That notion attracted me and the majority of the 1960s Republican Party and he was the 1964 candidate for president.

Lyndon Johnson (widely known as landslide Lyndon for his 48 vote victory in a Texas Senatorial election where several ballot boxes went missing) did a very good job of convincing the public that if they voted for Goldwater, he would blow up the world and certainly escalate the Viet Nam war. He did such a good job that even Kansas went Democratic that year.

Johnson left office in disgrace for his Viet Nam war mistakes and Republican Richard Nixon won a squeaker in 1968. This was the year of my first vote and I voted for Nixon. He was from the same party as Goldwater and I expected the same philosophy. Boy was I disappointed!

Many people of my generation became disenchanted with the Republicans as a source of conservative thought and action and the Libertarian Party was founded in 1971 as a reaction to Nixon's treachery. Other conservatives stayed with the Republicans out of some misplaced loyalty, true hate for the Democrats or just an example of the power of faith over experience. They are still conservative in the original meaning of wanting a small, obedient government.

Come we now to the present and a small group of war mongers wanted to make a splash on US foreign policy. They adopt the name of neo-conservative for themselves and manage to convince the large number of conservatives in the Republican Party that to be conservative means to do what they say. To be conservative today is to espouse a large and unruly government. Their style of government gets into wars at the drop of hat. It finds reasons to terminate long held civil liberties on lame excuses. It finds no problem in ignoring long held moral values of this nation and engages in massive torture, the disappearing of unwanted folks and all the other trappings of a police state.

Well all you small government conservatives, I ask you, has the Republican Party served you well? Have they kept the government small, kept spending down to a minimum and been obedient to the constitution? Of course not!

Since the Democratic Party is certainly not the party for small, obedient government, what will you do?

The only national party today that advocates what you say you want is the Libertarian Party. When we say we want a small government that will be obedient to the constitution, we mean it.
You should have joined us in the 1970's after the Nixon debacle but you must do it now. There is no other hope for the nation. If you want freedom for yourself and your posterity, join and support the Libertarians. It is the only reasonable alternative.

The Mainstream Coalition

Sunday, I sat in on a panel discussion sponsored by the Mainstream Coalition. The topics ranged from the separation of church and state to our relationship to Israel. Apparently the main focus of the Coalition is support of public education including increased finding and careful separation of religion and government.

How do we make them see that their goals are contradictory?

A substantial number of parents want their kids to be bible believers and to hear no contradictory facts and that is their right. This is the reason for the vehement battle over teaching evolution vs. Creation. What this battle really teaches us is that public education and religious freedom are simply not compatible.

The constitution says that there shall be no establishment of religion but it also says that there should be no laws interfering with the free exercise of religion. How do you protect the free exercise of religion for a fundamentalist Christian at the same time that you do not provide support for a religion with tax funds? As long as you run a tax supported government school system you simply cannot meet both goals.

The way to satisfy both requirements is to develop a program of choice in education. Then each parent can send his kid and the tax money that supports the school to the school that teaches what he wants his kid to learn. So tell my why the Mainstream Coalition is opposed to school choice?

Of course there will be many more benefits than just support of religious freedom.

Education, like any other service or commodity, gets better and cheaper when it is supplied by a competitive market. On the other hand, the Coalition believes, in a demonstration of the power of faith over experience, that all we need to make education better is more money.

Why would one expect that school board managers would use the extra money in the most efficient way? If anything, they have incentive to do poorly since they can use poor test results to ask for still more money. This is a classic example of adverse incentives. A private school manager, on the other hand, has every incentive to do the best job possible. He has to worry about dissatisfied parents removing their kids AND their money to some other school that does better.

Choice in education will cut the cost of education, probably in half. We just might be able to get government out of education all together which will mean a huge reduction in state taxes.

Questions!!

As a candidate for public office, I gets lots of questionnaires to fill out. Some are from special interest groups and they are pretty short and to the point. I really like the ones with broad questions that let you speak your mind without word limits. You can really define yourself in such a situation. Take a look at this one.


1. Do you support the three-year, $466 million school funding plan the Legislature passed this year? If not, what is the next step to address the school funding issue?

There is no way to judge the adequacy of funding absent any real competition. What few comparisons are available suggest that the public schools are over funded and wasting money wholesale. I would certainly NOT vote for more money to be wasted down the bottomless pit of public education.
Therefore, I would vote against the additional spending and also against any taxes intended to fund it. To fix this problem, we need to introduce real competition to education. This will save a major fraction of the spending and give the education consumer, the parents, some power to protect their kids from inferior education. What can a parent do now if their local public school is providing poor quality education? Going to meetings, complaining, writing letters to the editor are all trivial annoyances to the bureaucracy. Taking his kid and the money away is not so trivial and would get attention if it was an option.


2. In the push to fund K-12, some say higher education has been forgotten, and Kansas universities report more than $600 million in deferred maintenance costs. What should be done about the needs of Kansas’s institutions of higher learning?

It is hard to judge from current knowledge what the correct path to take is. I am quite sure there is waste and inefficiency in the system. I am quite sure that, besides the deferred physical maintenance, there is the same sloppy book keeping that hides future costs such as pension obligations (see question 4 below). I would support the status quo for now and push for a commission to study the system, determine the true costs and look for cost saving possibilities.


3. Shawnee is one of many cities looking to move forward with bioscience districts. Should there be a law to further regulate research in these districts, such as Missouri’s stem cell initiative?

If we want private interests to invest in medical research in our area, we had better give them assurance that they will not be subject to irrational regulation in the future which might destroy their investments. The battle going on in Missouri today over a constitutional amendment to ensure that the research will remain legal illustrates the problem. Without that amendment in place to protect them, no one will risk the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to reach useful treatment options for the sick.
Sooner or later, some jurisdiction will provide the needed protection and the world will get the benefits. I want it to be sooner rather than later and preferably here in the Kansas City Metro area so we can reap the economic benefits. You have no idea how many people’s lives you are shortening or ruining by delaying medical research!

4. The Kansas Public Employees Retirement System has a $5.1 billion gap between the value of its assets and its future obligations to provide pensions. What should the legislature do to ensure public employees have money for retirement?

The first step here is to start being honest with the taxpayers. The cost of employees is being fraudulently underreported in the budget. We need to know the real cost of government services so we can determine whether they make any sense. With honest accounting, it just might become obvious that government supplied services are much more expensive than similar services supplied in a competitive market environment. Unfortunately, the taxpayers will have to make up the shortfall in assets for current employees of the state. We had best get control of government spending before it bankrupts us. I support the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) amendment as a first step in controlling spending. I stress the first step. TABOR only slows the growth of spending. We need to actively cut out large chunks of spending by shutting down wasteful programs. We need that honest accounting to figure out what is wasteful.

5. What do you think the state should do in regard to illegal immigrants?

Nothing! The status of a resident of the state with a Federal bureaucracy is no concern of the state government. The state is obligated to treat everyone equally by the 14th amendment to the constitution.

6. Is there anything else you would like to see the Legislature address? What issues do you think are most important to voters in your district?

First I would move to protect property rights in two respects. I would fight for a state constitutional amendment to forbid the use of eminent domain for transfers to private interests. The legislative enactment passed last year is too full of loopholes and too easy to override to offer the protection of our property that is the basis of our freedom. I would also advocate stopping the practice of civil forfeiture. This is where police seize property based on suspicion only that the property may have been involved in a crime, without the need for that inconvenient due process.
Secondly I would fight for medical freedom. There are many sick people who can benefit from the use of Marijuana. Kansas should join 11 other states that have moved to protect patients from arrest. I can think of no greater evil than denying sick people their medicine.

7. Are there any statements your opponent(s) has(have) made in their campaign (whether about you, the issues or themselves) that you would like to address?
I challenge mostly the unspoken assumption that all the public schools need is more money and all will be well. We know that, in general terms, the quality of public education is poor. Surely it is better in some places than others, but we find, if we look at the facts from all around the nation, dispassionately, that there is no correlation between spending and results. There is no reason to expect more spending to make things better because there is no incentive for the managers of the system to do better. They get the money from taxes no matter how poorly they do. In fact, they use bad results as an excuse to ask for more money. Give them more money and they will merely waste more money. For every other class of goods and services in our nation, we depend on competition to supply the best quality at the lowest cost. That is what we need to do with education. This means that we should make it possible for a parent to take his kid out of public school and get the benefit of the tax expenditure attributable to his child to use at a private or parochial school of the parent’s choice. He can, of course, add to that money if he wishes but that will probably not be necessary. After some adjustment time, there should be plenty of private schools that will take the allotted amount and do a much better job of education.
As a minimum, the parent will be able to make an individual choice about what is taught to his kid on the burning questions of the day. I refer here, of course, to evolution vs. creation science, sex education and prayer in schools. This will also help with decisions on teaching methods like phonics in early childhood reading lessons. A whole generation was destroyed by education bureaucrats who insisted on what was once called “look-say” reading and is now called “whole language”.
Don’t you want control of your kid’s education? Don’t you want some bargaining power when talking to school administrators? They won’t miss your kid if you remove him from public school but they will miss the money.

8. Why should people vote for you?

If they want freedom for themselves and, most importantly for their kids and all future generations, they will vote for me and other Libertarians. Republicans and Democrats have proven again and again that they do not care about your freedom, only their power.
For those that need to put people in categories, I am a traditional conservative. That means that I believe in small government that restricts itself to only those functions permitted it in the constitution. I am aghast at the runaway spending and taxing that has become the hallmark of both Democratic and Republican administrations, state and Federal. I also stand dismayed and aghast at the civil liberties violations that have flowed from the “War on Terror”.

Stop voting for the lesser evil. You have not and will not be served well. If you want freedom, vote for freedom! Vote Libertarian!

A Modern Enabling Act

This week, both houses of congress violated their oaths of office and passed a bill that will allow agents of the federal government to torture human beings. Not just known terrorists but alleged terrorists or anyone the president says is an "unlawful combatant". This includes US citizens that have never left the US and never held a gun.

The bill lets the president define what is and what is not a violation of the Geneva conventions. Isn't that clear enough? He can define anything as 'not torture' and still say we are obeying the convention.

Congress has given the president a blank check to torture anyone. Guilt is not relevant. An innocent person picked up by mistake or for political revenge has no course of action left. The 800 year old protection against wrongful imprisonment, Habeas Corpus, does not apply when the president does not want it to apply. Due process, what is that? Good bye, Magna Carta. Goodbye fourth, sixth and eighth amendments.

Kansas Senators Roberts and Brownback and Congressman Dennis Moore voted FOR this horror. The courts have been told they have no roll.

It is time to remember Pastor Niemoller's famous quote, updated.

• When they came for the terrorist suspects, I did not speak out since I was not a terrorist.
• When they came for the Democrats, I did not speak out since I was not a Democrat.
• When they came for the Libertarians, I did not speak out since I was not a Libertarian.
• When they came for the anti-war activists, I did not speak out since I was not an anti-war activist.
• When they came for the atheists, I did not speak out since I was not an atheist.
• When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

For those who got their history from public schools, the Enabling Acts were a series of laws passed by the German Reichstag (parliment) in 1933-34 that, quite simply, gave the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, the power to do all the horrible things he did during the Holocaust. The name was given to them in retrospect, of course. The immediate reason was to stop those terrible communists that had burned down the Reichstag building. The Fatherland needed to be protected, you see.